Federated on "end of low-rates"
Federated Investors wrote last week "The end of low-rate frustration is almost in sight", They said, "From a rate perspective, the frustration is ending. We haven't seen the light at the end of the tunnel yet, but we can at least imagine seeing it. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting last month furthered this optimism when new chair Janet Yellen announced the continuation of its monthly tapering of asset purchases, lowering the amount of Treasuries and agencies being purchased to $55 billion from $65 billion per month. The Fed also moved away from the quantitative approach to forward guidance that had been in place. It is not that the Fed was saying that unemployment and inflationary statistics are no longer important, but rather that they felt a broader, less-quantitative approach was merited. The FOMC statement indicated that the current target range would be in place for a considerable period of time after QE ends, which, if the Fed keeps on the current pace of reduction, could be in late 2014. Or will it? In her question-and-answer press conference after the FOMC announcement, Yellen went on to describe "considerable" as around six months. Many analysts felt Yellen misspoke, perhaps flustered by the peppering of reporters' questions, but FOMC members didn't race to soften her comments. Maybe more telling was the summary of economic projections released at the time of the announcement; here, the majority of FOMC members thought that tightening would commence in 2015, with an average projection for the fed funds target at year-end 2015 in excess of 1%. With that outlook, in the second half of 2014 we would expect to see a slight steepening of a yield curve that is quite flat now. The bond market seems to bear this out by the fact that few are buying March bonds. With an expectation that rates might actually be increasing, the portfolio strategy is not to buy the longest thing out there at this point in time. Instead, investors are keeping weighted-average-maturities relatively steady, buying more floating-rate positions and shortening the barbell."
